A large portion of communication and information associated with an enterprise is often stored personal information management (PIM) and groupware systems in the form of emails, address books, task lists, and appointments, as well as other proprietary tools. At the same time, customized Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems are often needed in order to keep track of information about a specific customer and product base and to generally provide relevant business processes and scalability. Thus, organizations today must integrate groupware with more traditional information systems such as CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and others. Unfortunately, the proprietary nature of groupware and PIM systems typically makes it difficult and expensive for an enterprise to integrate their data and information into other applications.
FIG. 1 shows an illustration of a typical enterprise system as available in the prior art. For example, many business organizations implement collaboration systems such as Microsoft Exchange® Server and Lotus Domino®. Thus, employees 100 may use the email systems such as Microsoft Outlook 102 provided by the MS Exchange server 106 in order to communicate, keep track of appointments, contacts, tasks, meetings and generally collaborate amongst each other when working on various projects. At the same time CRM applications 104 can provide access to account management, opportunities and prospects maintained in a customer relations database 108. A significant part of the functionality provided by these separate systems often overlaps thereby creating inconsistencies and missing information which can impede performance and profitability of a company. For example, an employee may schedule an appointment with a customer via the CRM application 104 but that appointment may not be created or updated in the collaboration server 106 such as Microsoft Exchange. Alternatively, if an employee uses the groupware system to create the appointment, the CRM database may not be properly updated thereby causing missing information and inaccurate views of the customer.
The result is that in many enterprises frustrated users toggle between groupware and other applications, duplicating work and data—often with dubious integrity or efficiency. What is needed is an improved system of integration, one that would facilitate interoperability between proprietary groupware and PIM systems and custom enterprise applications. For example, it may be desireable for a custom Java application to gain acess to personal contacts, email and appointments without having to know the complexities of proprietary groupware and PIM provider. It may also be desireable for such functionality to be achieved non-intrusively, without causing disruption to the rest of the enterprise.